Spammers mock Yeltsin’s death

Yesterday, all of Russia was saying farewell to Boris Yeltisn Russia’s first president. All? Not spammers – they were too busy flooding email traffic with messages that had headers saying “Boris Yeltsin lives”.

Inside, the emails had the following text:

The text was naturally followed by a link to read more. Thankfully, in this case the links did not lead to malware.

Spammers are well known for using hot topics as social engineering tools to get naïve users to respond to spam. Deaths or purported deaths of well known figures are a popular topic.

The links in the Yeltsin spam led to a community board where people can ask doctors questions. Many upset victims left angry posts, but the moderators have not responded to date. The point of the spam attack? The target site is a community effort, so unless one of advertisers on the site paid, there really doesn’t seem to have been a real point.

In any case, the spammers have once again demonstrated their lack of respect for basic human values.